Harmony

Frank Dicksee exhibited Harmony at the Royal Academy in 1879, four years after his successful debut there and in the same decade that established him as one of the leading painters of romantic narrative in British art. The subject — a young woman at a piano, the music providing the nominal title — belongs to a Aesthetic Movement convention of the 1870s and 1880s in which sensory experience, particularly musical, was treated as a subject in its own right. Dicksee was drawn throughout his career to moments of transported feeling, and the piano player allowed him to portray beauty suffused with interior emotion without recourse to overt narrative. The Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum in Burnley, which holds the work, assembled a significant collection of Victorian salon painting that represented the taste of northern English industrial collectors in the late nineteenth century.

Dicksee employs a warm interior palette of golds and ambers, with the woman's dress acting as the dominant chromatic element against the darker piano and background. His handling of fabric is meticulous — the sheen of the silk gown is differentiated from the matte upholstery of the stool. Soft, diffuse light from an unseen source models the face without hard shadows.